Hello and happy Saturday. President Donald Trump’s decision one week ago to order strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordow has spawned a number of important questions, some of which we won’t be able to answer quickly or easily. And the answer to one big unknown—just how much damage the strikes did to Iran’s nuclear program—will undoubtedly shape the answers to others: What is next for the U.S. and Iran? Will the Islamic Republic’s theocratic regime survive?
Kenneth M. Pollack, vice president for policy at the Middle East Institute and a former CIA analyst, ran through the uneven history of counterproliferation efforts—Israeli and American campaigns to take out the nuclear capabilities of Iraq, Iran, and Syria since the 1980s—and he argued that last week’s strike on Iran can be deemed a success only if it eliminated Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and prevents Iran from acquiring nukes later.
The key to all of this is that the United States and Israel will have to convince the current Iranian leadership that if they try to reconstitute their nuclear program and acquire nuclear weapons as fast as they can, they will suffer even worse consequences. That means being able to threaten things that Iran’s leaders hold even dearer than their nuclear program: their own lives and their grip on power.
Regime change is a fraught topic to consider, given the outcomes of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Kevin D. Williamson says that there’s more than one way to go about it:
When it comes to regime change, the change is more important than the regime.
The Israeli and American assaults on Iran have conspicuously spared the political leaders of the so-called Islamic republic. The Israelis have shown that they can get to almost anybody in Iran they choose, and it is difficult to conclude that this has been anything other than an intentional choice. … The message in that seems clear enough: What Israel and the United States expect from Iran is regime change—a change in the character and the behavior of the regime, if not in its personnel.
In his Wednesday G-File (🔒), Jonah Goldberg defended the idea of regime change on the grounds that Iran’s leadership is evil—reminding readers about its history of “blinding protesters, executing children, throwing women into prison for not wearing a hijab, executing people for drinking alcohol, not to mention the systemic use of torture and the subjugation of ethnic minorities”—and argued that, at the very least, Iran should be kept from getting nuclear weapons. But he also warned against the fetishization of the nonproliferation process:
A lot of people are angry that Trump has done violence to the nuclear nonproliferation process. If I thought that process worked, I would share some of that anger. But I don’t think that process works, at least not very well. … In fact, the process becomes a problem unto itself because the people invested in it have a deep interest in insisting that the process is working—when it isn’t—and that breeds complacency when urgency is required.
One of the factors that adds to the urgency of the situation is that we simply don’t know how successful the strikes were. The U.S. dropped “bunker busters” on the Fordow and Natanz and launched cruise missiles from a nuclear submarine in an attempt to take out Isfahan. President Trump has claimed multiple times that the strikes “obliterated” the facilities, but a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report suggests that Iran’s nuclear program may have been set back only by months. Klon Kitchen warned against reading too much into early assessments and warned of the dangers of intelligence leaks.
In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio wrote that Trump wouldn’t be the first president to overstate the success of a military operation (remember “Mission Accomplished”?) but that Trump is in a vulnerable position because he “is obsessed with perceptions of strength”:
If facts should come to light that prove he has made a mistake, he’ll press as hard and tirelessly as a human being can to construct a narrative in which the facts are wrong, not him. That’s what’s at stake in the mystery over whether Iran’s nuclear program has been “totally obliterated.” If it hasn’t been, it won’t just be a strategic or political embarrassment. It’ll be the most formidable test yet of Trump’s ability to create his own reality and get his fans to believe it. He and his defense secretary are getting started on that early.
All that, and I haven’t even mentioned the other big news of the week. The Supreme Court handed down the final decisions of its term (check out our new SCOTUSblog colleagues’ revived Stat Pack for a data-driven analysis of the term!), and 33-year-old socialist Zohran Mamdani upset former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary. More on those stories below! Thanks for reading and have a good weekend.
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When Women Are Radicalized
How Sergio Gor Cashed in With Trumpworld
Best of the Rest
Tax Bill Highlights the Collapse of GOP Policymaking
Mamdani’s Big Apple Upset
Japan: Our Undervalued Asian Ally
Trump’s Tariffs Have Democrats Sounding Like—Gasp!—Libertarians
It’s Time to Prosecute Pornhub
Why MAGA Loves the 1950s
SCOTUS Sides with Trump
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